I am a researcher/research director – a senior data scientist, social scientist, community-engaged scholar, and administrator – with 20+ years of experience teaching, leading, and managing research and data science teams. Recently I’ve been building and leading Research Data Services and the Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences in the UVA Library, where I lead an amazing team of statistical and computational consultants, data curation and data discovery librarians, research software specialists, and subject librarians.
I have been fortunate to engage in a wide variety of work – as a political science professor and quantitative scholar at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Virginia; as a data scientist engaged in applied work with the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service; as a researcher bridging applied and academic interests often with community partners; and as a consultant and leader creating UVA’s StatLab.
And I’ve been grateful to find many generous and creative partners along the way who’ve invited me to be part of collaborative work. Current partners include:
- Community Policy, Analytics, and Strategy Lab (CommPAS), co-directing a community-oriented research initiative with Paul Martin in the Batten School of Public Policy and the UVA StatLab,
- Public Interest Data Lab, leading a curricular lab in the Batten School of Public Policy designed to provide data science experience to students oriented towards justice,
- The Global Policy Center’s Humanitarian Collaborative, working with David Leblang on on predictive analytics for humanitarian goals,
- The Virginia Equity Center, partnering with Barbara Brown Wilson and the Democratization of Data Initiative to co-create a regional equity atlas with our community.
My own work has turned towards action-based research, using the tools of data science to promote accountable governance, make visible racial and other social inequities, and impact public policy and movement building. More importantly, I hope I’m mentoring the amazing young people I get to work with at UVA to engage this work early in their careers.
Also, sometimes I play the mandolin, pretend I’m learning to play the banjo, and harbor a dream of joining a home-grown bluegrass band!
Research Projects
More academically-oriented projects.
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Working to build and evaluate models of displacement that can be of use in humanitarian response.
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Part of UVA’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy’s Global Policy Center, in partnership with Save the Children, International.
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An ongoing research effort to record decades of thoughtful and bold calls for racial equity written by students, faculty, and staff at the University of Virginia, to analyze them for common themes, and to create an interactive library to advance the conversation.
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A collaboration between the UVA Equity Center and the President’s Racial Equity Task Force.
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Re-imagining UVA as a place where first generation and lower income students thrive
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Working with first-gen and low-income students to create research and knowledge for advocacy and change.
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Developing new ways for the public to engage political news, one that allows people to monitor the activities and attentions of government from a relatively high level, that encourages the consumption of information from multiple and varied sources, and that lowers the barriers to attentive citizenship in ways that reduce inequalities in time, education, and access.
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In other words, using machine learning to promote collective civic capacity. Here’s an early presentation: https://datafordemocracy.github.io/engagingnews/index.html
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My book (University of Illinois Press 2011) examines how citizens learn and use accountability standards during presidential campaigns.
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Additional peer-reviewed publications focus on repetition priming in campaigns (Journal of Politics 2008) and what citizens hear from campaign rhetoric (Political Communication 2012).
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Investigating the causes and consequences of citizen participation in electoral systems.
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Including research on how campaigns mobilize (Political Behavior 2012), congressional responsiveness to citizen participation (Legislative Studies Quarterly 2013), and how women’s political enagement is shaped by political structures.
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Examining the production of social capital (Political Behavior 2000) and how social capital promotes policy accountability (Political Research Quarterly 2007).
Workshops and Instruction
A few examples of workshops, instructional blog posts, and other projects and materials created as educational resources.
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A multi-part example of text analysis in R
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Examining the comments submitted to UVA’s new president’s Ours to Shape website.
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We partnered with UVA’s new PhD Plus program to create a six-session series to build data analysis, wrangling, and visualization skills
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And used the opportunity to dig deeper into Albemarle County Real Estate data as part of an ongoing partnership with the County.
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Contributions to our UVA Library Data Workshop series
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Including data wrangling, linear modeling, text as data (sentiment analysis, topic modeling, classification), survival analysis, matching methods, mulitiple imputation, cluster analysis, mixed-effects models
Library Projects
Projects done on behalf of library units and intiatives.
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A dashboard describing the work of the UVA Library’s Research Data Services and Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences teams.
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To better understand usage patterns and costs of big deal journal packages, we’ve begun to analyze data on the number of articles downloaded from a given journal as well as metrics on the the number of articles published by UVA authors, the number of citations to a journal by UVA authors, and the the number of articles available via open-access.
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Part of our prepration for the impending “big deal” negotiations.
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A pilot study using aggregated log data from wifi access points in library buildings to investigate the number of unique visitors to library spaces as well as the timing, duration, and characteristics of visitors.
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And we’re using it now as background data in conversations about re-opening library spaces for the upcoming COVID fall.
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Budget model forecasts to support library administration as we move to a responsibility-centered budget model.